How to bleep out a word in a video

Bleeping a word takes two steps in Video by Zaweba. Mark the range on the timeline where the word is spoken, then choose Clip > Bleep the marked range, and the word is covered by a bleep. It's free, offline and works on any clip with sound.

Swearing in a vlog, a name that shouldn't be heard, a password read out by mistake on a screen recording: the bleep is the classic answer, and it's quicker to do than to describe.

Finding the word

First find exactly where the word sits. Play the clip and stop near it, then zoom the timeline with Ctrl and the mouse wheel so the waveform is large enough to see individual syllables. Words show up as small humps in the waveform, with dips between them.

If the recording has been transcribed in the Transcript tab, it's even easier. Search the transcript for the word to jump straight to it, which saves listening through a long interview to find one slip.

Marking and bleeping

Set an in mark just before the word starts and an out mark just after it ends. Give it a frame or two of room either side; a bleep that clips the edge of a swear word lets the first letter slip through, which can be funnier than intended. Then choose Clip > Bleep the marked range.

Play it back. If the bleep is too short or starts late, undo with Ctrl+Z, move the marks and bleep again. Every edit is a snapshot, so you can try as many times as you like without damaging anything. The original file on disk is never changed either; Video by Zaweba only ever reads your media.

Hiding the mouth too

On camera, viewers can sometimes lip-read the word you've bleeped. If that matters, blur or pixelate the mouth for the same moment. Draw a mask round the mouth, give a blur effect that mask so it only acts inside it, and use Track forward on the mask so it follows the face through the shot. Keep the effect to the same length as the bleep so it's clear what's being hidden.

When a bleep isn't the right answer

Sometimes silence works better than a bleep, especially in a calm interview where a sudden tone would jar. In that case, split the sound clip around the word with S and lower or remove that piece, or use a short fade either side so the cut doesn't click.

If a word needs bleeping many times through a long film, the transcript helps again: search for it, step through each place it's said and bleep each one in turn. It's still manual, but you won't miss any.

A related tool lives in the same menu. Clip > Break out to mono clips separates a stereo or dual-mic recording into its channels, so if the word was only picked up loudly on one microphone you can deal with that channel on its own.

Finish by watching the whole video once more with sound up. Bleeps are easy to add and easy to miss, and one surviving swear word is the one everyone will hear.